Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described herein are not prior art to the claims in the present application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Currently, IMAP servers store one email as one entity without considering any Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) parts in each email. There is no known mechanism provided to extract metadata of MIME parts of an email for further use in IMAP commands by the IMAP client. Therefore, MIME attachments, or other MIME parts of an email, cannot be searched, or listed by the IMAP client at the level of the MIME attachments or other MIME parts. Instead any SEARCH, SORT, or other IMAP commands are performed at the level of the emails. For example, a SEARCH can return a reply that, e.g., a given email matched a query, without specifying whether it was a message text body or an attachment of the email that specifically matched the query.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one exemplary technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.